


Tell Me About Despair

by DetectiveJoan



Category: Fablehaven Series - Brandon Mull
Genre: Dubcon Kissing, Everyone is Ace, Healing, M/M, Memory Magic, Platonic Kissing, post Wrath of the Dragon King
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-18
Updated: 2019-04-18
Packaged: 2020-01-15 19:41:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18505744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetectiveJoan/pseuds/DetectiveJoan
Summary: “I can fix your memory,” Bracken says slowly, testing the idea even as he says it. “But you're not going to like how.”“How?” Seth asks without hesitation.Bracken rubs his thumb along the back of Seth’s hand. “What do you know about fairy kisses?”





	Tell Me About Despair

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings: very light dubcon, fantasy age difference, and...maybe underage? There's nothing I would call explicitly sexual in this fic but Seth is still 13 years old, so please proceed with caution if that's something that might hit your squick button.
> 
> Title from "[Wild Geese](http://detectivejoan.tumblr.com/post/182232647714/wild-geese-by-mary-oliver-1935-2019-id-a)" by Mary Oliver

Number one on the list of things Bracken learned from his 500-year stint in captivity: don’t count the days, it just gets depressing.

He repeats this to himself for five days straight, then accepts that the fact that the knows he’s been saying it for five days means he can’t turn off the part of his brain that’s counting, and then he scratches five tallies into the wall beside the door with the sharpest rock he’s been able to find.

As far as he can tell, he’s the only occupant of this particular dungeon. The guards feel like they might be wraiths, but they keep enough distance that he can’t be certain. Three of the cell walls are thick stone and the fourth is constructed of simple metal bars, but there’s been no sign of life in the dim hallway he can see through it. There aren’t even torches on the wall.

All of the bars have been magically reinforced enough that he hasn’t been able to sense a weak spot yet. Bracken tells himself he’ll wait two weeks to see if any rescue efforts pan out before he starts digging. He _hates_ digging.

On day thirteen, he’s sitting against a wall, singing a Silvan song to himself to pass the time, and trying not to wonder whether or not Kendra’s survived her stint as caretaker thus far, when he senses something brush up against him. It’s not physical, but mental—magical. Someone’s reaching beyond the limits of space to run their fingers through his aura.

He stops singing.

The touch freezes in response, and now that it’s still he can tell it’s coming from the other side of the cell door.

“Who’s there?” he calls.

It’s not exactly surprising that he doesn’t get an answer. He lets his vision go out of focus and reaches into the hallway with his own magic.

“I know you’re there,” he says. “I can feel you.”

He gives the person another chance to answer before he presses on.

“You’re human, right? But….darker. Cloaked. Ah, a shadowcharmer,” he says as he puts it together. Any hope he might have been holding for an escape fades out. No shadowcharmer worth the title would help a unicorn pull off a jailbreak. He settles back against the wall.

The visitor remains silent.

“There’s not too many of those around,” Bracken says, half to himself now. “I just hope you’re not the Sphinx coming to gloat. I guess I’d have to give Ronodin points for creativity, though; that really would be a new form of torture.”

“Why would the Sphinx be gloating?”

Bracken hardly hears the question, because he _knows that voice_. He scrambles up and to the cell door, peering out even though he knows there’s nothing there to see.

“Seth?” he asks incredulously. “What are you doing here?”

There’s a pause. He sees the shadows shift, but only because he knows to look for it.

“You know who I am?” Seth asks, sounding surprised.

“What are you talking about? Of course I do.” It’s still hard to feel under all the darkness and silence that Seth has apparently wrapped around himself, but when Bracken concentrates there’s no question that the boy standing in front of him is the same one he met in the dungeons of Living Mirage just a few weeks ago. “Are you okay?”

He doesn’t see any movement this time, but when Seth speaks again his voice comes from several feet down the hall. “I have to go,” he says. “I shouldn’t have come down here.”

Bracken wants to call after him, but he can’t risk being heard by the guards. Seth’s name sits heavily in his mouth as he stares out at the empty hall.

/ / /

He turns the conversation over and over in his mind.

If it had just been Seth’s voice, it could have been any of a dozen forms of magical trickery. It could have been a creature with a knack for mimicry, or the result of a potion that allowed for exceptional imitation. If Bracken had been able to see Seth, he would have guessed it was a stingbulb.

None of those possibilities would have been able to shadewalk like that, though. No, it had to have been Seth—with all his powers intact, but apparently with some gaps in his memory. Bracken can’t even begin to guess what happened to him, let alone how he ended up in….whatever dungeon Ronodin’s left Bracken to rot in.

Four days later, Bracken hears fingernails tapping softly against one of the cell bars.

“Hello?” he responds, unsure what to expect. He can’t sense anything about the visitor this time; whoever it is is being much more careful to keep themself hidden from him.

“Who are you?” Seth asks.

Bracken closes his eyes and breathes a sigh of relief—that Seth’s still alive, that he’s free, that he came back—and then pulls himself together and starts thinking towards the long game.

“Who wants to know?” he responds, playing at nonchalance.

“You know who I am,” Seth says.

Bracken raises his eyebrows in a performance of skepticism. “I know whose voice you’re using,” he corrects. “But you’re not acting like the Seth Sorenson I know.”

Seth doesn’t answer. Is he weighing responses? Or has he left again? Bracken’s flying blind, and it’s unnerving. He crosses to stand in front of the cell door and looks out at the hallway. Still empty.

“I don’t have to prove anything to you,” Seth says petulantly.

“You do if you want me to answer your questions,” Bracken responds. “I’ll make you a deal, though. I’ll tell you who I am if you let me see you.”

It’s hard to negotiate with a person whose poker face is perfect by virtue of invisibility, but Bracken’s faced down harder foes before. He keeps his gaze firm.

Seth eventually mutters “Fine,” and materializes, leaning back against the wall directly opposite the cell door, arms crossed. He’s scowling.

Bracken’s eyes rake over every inch of him. There aren’t any visible injuries. His boots and the knees of his jeans are both covered in dry mud. His brown hair is a mess, sticking up at odd angles like he’d been sleeping in it for several days, and there are creases under his eyes like he hasn’t been sleeping at all.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Seth says.

“Like what?” Bracken asks, hastily trying to school his face into neutrality.

Seth kicks out one foot and digs the heel into the crack between two of the paver stones. He’s watching his own movements instead of looking at Bracken. “Like you’re happy to see me.”

“But I am happy to see you.”

“Just because you’ve been alone down here for a billion years, or what?” Seth presses his end of the bargain.

“I’ve only been down here a few weeks, I think.” It’s been 17 days exactly, which he knows because he has both an impeccable internal clocks and 17 tally marks scratched into the wall. “I’m glad to see you because you’re my friend and I was worried about you.”

Seth looks up at him with a hard expression. “You think I’m here to rescue you.”

“If you remembered who I was, you probably would,” Bracken says. “You helped me break out of another dungeon earlier this summer.”

Seth tilts his head. “You got yourself captured again that quickly?”

It almost stings, how sharp he is.

“I always was good at getting into trouble,” Bracken admits ruefully.

Seth digs his heel again, but this time it’s more restless than annoyed. “Your name’s Bracken, right? The Sphinx mentioned you. Said you were a unicorn. And an irritant.”

Bracken manages a smile. It’s nice to have his efforts appreciated.

“What makes you think I’m a unicorn?” he asks coyly.

Seth screws up his face in disgust. “You’re so _bright.”_ He says it like a dirty word.

That stings, too.

“You’ve never been able to see how bright I am before.”

“I’ve learned how to see a lot of things recently,” Seth says vaguely.

“The Sphinx has been training you, then?”

Seth shrugs his shoulders. “Some.”

“Is he the one who took your memory?”

His eyebrows furrow unhappily and he looks down the hall. His gaze is a hundred miles away.

“Seth?” Bracken prods softly.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t remember. Obviously. Ronodin says he doesn’t know what happened to my memory either, but—”

He cuts himself off and sucks in a breath through his teeth.

“You don’t trust him,” Bracken supplies.

Seth looks back at him. “I don’t trust you, either,” he says.

“Not even if I say I could figure out what happened to you?”

“Especially not then,” Seth replies, wholly unimpressed. “What else would you say to try to convince me to break you out.”

“I can do it from in here. I just need to take your hand for a few minutes.” Bracken offers out his right hand. The gap between the bars is small enough that his arm gets stuck just below the elbow, not nearly far enough to actually reach Seth. Bracken holds his palm up and wiggles his fingers a bit invitingly.

Seth keeps lounging against the wall. He looks at Bracken skeptically. “Seriously?” he asks.

Bracken goes to shrug, but the movement pulls his forearm against bars a bit painfully so he stops.

“Seriously,” he says. “It lets me feel out your brain. Not just your thoughts, but the unconscious parts, too. If I can find your old memories, I should be able to figure out why you can’t access them anymore.”

Seth scrunches up his face and looks down the hallway again. Bracken holds his breath; he doesn’t need a psychic connection to know Seth’s thinking about leaving again.

“Okay, fine,” Seth finally says. “But if you do anything weird, I’m out of here and I’m not coming back.”

“Nothing weird in the mind-reading,” Bracken says. “Got it.”

Seth crosses the hallway and clasps his hand.

The first thing Bracken feels is the truncation—the huge, empty spaces where Seth’s mind is struggling to make connections and pull memories that simply aren’t where they should be.

The general form, the shape of Seth's thoughts, is the same as it was when they met. There's goodness at the foundations; selflessness in every scaffold. There's also impulsively and pride and a thirst for glory, but none of it in intolerable amounts.

The memories haven't been erased, which makes sense. Magically altering the mind is one very difficult thing, but completely removing parts of a person is a whole nother nigh-impossible ballgame. The memories just aren't where they're supposed to be.

He catches the end of a memory Seth does have—the very recent sense of watching Bracken through the cell door, the curiosity, the intrigue, the unabashed interest in the dungeon’s singular occupant. It's wispy, still loose from being so fresh, but Bracken manages to hold and follow it. It trails away, back to memories from a few days ago, then a few weeks ago, then—

Seth's grip tightens.

The memories older than that aren't just damaged, they're shredded. A less powerful spell would have boxed them up to cut them off from Seth's conscious mind, but whoever did this had the power to make them truly illegible. The remnants of thirteen years worth of memories float around him like wind-blown ashes. Too delicate to catch hold of, too small to put back together, yet too numerous to ignore. Bracken could choke on them; he can't imagine how it feels to Seth.

But at least they're still there.

“I can fix this,” he says slowly, testing the idea even as he says it. “But you're not going to like how.”

“How?” Seth asks without hesitation.

Bracken rubs his thumb against Seth's skin. “What do you know about fairy kisses?”

“Fairies?” Seth repeats, sounding bewildered. “Nothing.”

“They have powerful restorative magic,” Bracken explains. “They un-do damage. It's not exactly the same as healing, but it's a similar end result.”

Seth gets the idea immediately; he frowns. “You're not a fairy.”

“Close enough,” Bracken replies.

“Yeah, but kisses? That's gross.”

“I told you you wouldn't like it.”

“I hate it,” he corrects. “Don't you have any other sort-of-healing powers?”

Bracken makes a show of glancing behind himself at the cell; it’s utterly empty but for the small cot in the corner. “I'm a little light on resources at the moment,” he jokes.

“Yeah, funny no one thought to take your lips away when they locked you up,” Seth quips in agreement, but his heart isn't in the joke. He sighs. “How do you know it'll even work?”

Bracken slips his other hand through the bars so he can gently hold Seth's in both of his, and pulls until Seth's arm is the one reaching through. He holds Seth's gaze as they move, waiting for him to hit his breaking point and tug free, but Seth lets himself be taken.

Bracken runs his thumb gently along Seth's skin again, they turns his wrist, leans over, and briefly presses his lips to the back of Seth's hand.

Seth shivers.

“Bumper cars,” he says. Then, “Oh, that was weird.”

Bracken straightens up so he Seth can see his questioning look.

“I had a—a memory?” Seth says. “Or a flashback? I don’t know. But it was at this bumper car arena at this amusement park I used to go to every summer. The motors on the cars were always really loud, and the seat belts were never tight enough, so you just had to hold on with one hand so you wouldn't fly out of the car every time you hit something. And it was always so dark in there, no matter how bright the sun was outside. The paint was peeling on all of the cars, but the colors were awful to begin with so that wasn’t too bad. The green was the grossest shade, but those cars steered better than the others. I always chose one of those, but my—” he faltered. “The person I went with, he—no, she—she always…”

His face screws up in concentration. Bracken can feel the memory trailing away into cinders even as Seth chases it.

“Kendra?” Bracken guesses softly. “Your sister?”

Seth seems to make a decision very quickly. He tugs his hand back, and roughly wipes Bracken’s kiss off on the front of his shirt.

“Wait here,” he says, then takes two steps down the hall and fades into the shadows.

“Like I have a choice,” Bracken mutters, apparently to himself. He drums his fingers restlessly against the bars, then turns and paces to the other end of the cell, wondering idly if he just watched his primary hope for escape disappear for good.

If it were really Seth—the boy Bracken knows and needs, who is too reckless and trusting by half—he’d be back in a heartbeat. But Bracken can’t begin to guess how a person changes when he’s been damaged that deeply by magic, let alone when he’s spent two weeks being put back together all wrong by a dark unicorn and a shadowcharmer that made a pretty decent run at ending the world.

The coldness radiating from the hallway gets progressively more intense. Goosebumps run up Bracken’s arms. He does his best to shrug them off.

He hears a key turn in the lock of the cell. The hinges scream as the door swings inward and then shuts again, apparently of its own accord.

Seth appears in front of it.

“I brought one of the wraiths over to let me in,” he says, jerking his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the freezing figure now hovering on the opposite side of the metal bars, “and to make sure you didn’t sneak out in the process.”

Bracken blinks at him. “That’s...smart thinking,” he concedes.

“Yeah, I’m practically a genius for not letting the only prisoner in the entire dungeon waltz out.” Seth rolls his eyes. “Can we get this kissing thing over with?”

Bracken shrugs.

Truth be told, he’s no more enthusiastic about the process than Seth is, even if his disinterest comes from a different place. Seth, Bracken knows even as he takes his hand again, is genuinely disgusted by the entire idea of having another person put their mouth on his. Bracken doesn’t really mind it, not anymore, but it’s always felt rather clinical. It’s not spell work exactly, but it is still a magic ritual and that does tend to drain any semblance of romance or fun out of it.

“Try not to think about it,” Bracken advises, and then kisses Seth’s cheek. It’s warm, and soft with peach-fuzz.

“What should I think about instead?” Seth asks.

“Me. That way I can make sure you’re remembering correctly. Where did we meet?” Bracken sets another kiss just off the corner of his mouth.

“No idea.”

Bracken tilts his head and finally presses his lips to Seth’s. He lets the tips of his canines catch on his bottom lip when he pulls back an inch.

Seth licks his lips automatically.

“The dungeons under Living Mirage,” he says. “You came through the wall and accused me of being some kind of spy.”

Bracken nods. “Good. What’s Living Mirage?”

Seth shakes his head, but Bracken can already see in his mind: the answer isn’t there yet.

He leans forward into another kiss, this time running the tip of his tongue along the seam of Seth’s lips until the memory coalesces.

Seth moves to speak, but Bracken doesn’t give him the space, instead sliding his tongue into Seth’s open mouth. The boy makes a noise of surprise in his throat, but he must sense the magic working as well as Bracken does because he finally starts kissing him back. Bracken watches as Seth’s mind puts together the existence of the Turkan preserve, then the keys, then Zzyzx, then the dragons, then the sanctuaries, then the other secret preserves—then Fablehaven. His family. His grandparents.

His sister.

Seth drops Bracken’s hand to grab fistfuls of his shirt, desperately tugging him closer as Bracken’s view into his mind cuts out. Bracken nearly stumbles into him at the unexpected pull.

He brings his hands up to cup Seth’s face. With his palms on Seth’s neck he can see again, as they kiss and kiss and kiss, and now it’s memory after memory of Kendra.

She’s kneeling in front of Seth in a dawn-fogged field, shaking him to consciousness and looking worried enough to cry.

Seth’s sitting in the snow in a cemetery, wearing an ill-fitting suit and purposefully not looking at her fresh grave.

The two of them are arguing passionately beside a lake in Wyrmroost.

And there at the very end: Kendra is standing beside Seth, watching anxiously as he turns a key in the lock of a wooden door and all his memories burn up in an instant.

“Isn’t there anything happy here?” Bracken tries to joke when Seth finally pulls away to catch his breath.

When Bracken looks into his mind now, everything is much calmer. There’s still the sense of ash, but it’s not so overwhelming. The biggest parts of his memory and identity have mended themselves together rather smoothly.

Seth looks dazed. He carefully lets go of Bracken’s shirt and crosses the cell on shaky legs to collapse on the edge of the cot. He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand.

“A lot of it was happy,” he finally says. “But mostly the older stuff, from when we were kids. The last few years have been…” he trails off, gesturing vaguely to the fact that they’re in a dungeon cell.

Bracken sits beside him. His lips feel rubbery, bordering on numb. He runs his tongue over his teeth to reorient himself to his own mouth.

Seth falls onto his back, bringing one hand up and softly tracing his bottom lip with the pad of his middle finger.

“Oh man, she’s gonna kill me,” he says. “This is like that time she got to feed zombies and totally didn’t appreciate how cool it was. This is the payback. I have to kiss the boy she’s completely crazy for, and I don’t even like kissing.”

“We don’t _have_ to tell her,” Bracken points out.

Seth snorts.

“Seriously?” he says. “Didn’t you just see—”

He takes Bracken’s hand again so Bracken can watch the memory of the cemetery repeat. Now that it’s fully put together, Bracken can feel the sharpness of the grief and pain and loss radiating from every moment of it. He has to fight to swallow it down.

“I’m not keeping secrets that could hurt her,” Seth says with finality.

“No, you’re right,” Bracken agrees. “Of course you’re right.”

“And I was only kidding about her killing me. She’ll get over it as soon as she gets a chance to make out with you herself.”

“I’ll put that at the top of my to-do list,” Bracken deadpans, “for your sake.”

Seth playfully slugs him in the arm. “Hey, it’ll be the least you can do in exchange for me helping you pull off a jailbreak. Again.”

Seth gets to his feet, then turns back and offers his hand with a grin.

Bracken takes it without hesitation. “Deal.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm DetectiveJoan and you can come yell with me about fictional kissing on [tumblr](http://detectivejoan.tumblr.com/)


End file.
